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Simon Baker is The Mentalist
By Fred Topel | Image property of CBS
The Mentalist
Baker Talks The Mentalist
"The guys that are good at it, it’s incredibly seamless," said Baker. "Look, I’m narcissistic enough to be interested in psychics. If I go to a flea market, I see someone doing Tarot reading, I’ll be indulgent and go over and give ten bucks, tell me about me. It’s just pure narcissism on my part. Once I started looking at mentalism, I realize that these guys that are very good at it, it’s the seamless nature that they do. When a psychic is being a psychic, they have the latitude to be broad and over the top, like in the pilot where I’m doing the thing, it’s ham-fisted, sort of, which was fun for me to play, but someone like Darren Brown, if you’re familiar with any of his stuff, he’s fantastic. He’s an English guy that’s just remarkable, and he’s also a skeptic at the same time. He debunks most of the things that he does within his segments. He does it so easily. He doesn’t do it in a way where you feel like you are being put upon."
For the show, Baker does not have to learn real skills. The writers provide that for him. "I’ve got a great script writer here, a guy who writes great stuff. In the episode that we’re shooting right now, the second episode after the pilot, there’s a section where I hypnotize a girl, and it’s very well-written. The script arrived and a book about this thick on hypnotism arrived with it. So I looked at a lot of that."
However, part of the fun of the show might be that this mentalist is sometimes wrong. "What I love about it is that a lot of it is good, old-fashioned guesswork. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t work where it’s an attempt to create a façade, disorient people, or reframe things, or point them in the wrong direction. Sometimes it works and sometimes it barely works and sometimes it just doesn’t work at all."
The Mentalist will be a new mystery each week, but Baker intends to give regular viewers something to follow from week to week. "I was a fan of procedural shows when I was a kid because they were more about people. These days, they’re more about science so they’re a bit too clinical for me. What I liked about this particular character and show is that it’s almost sort of sets itself up as a procedural show slightly, and it’s very subtle, but it’s an anti-procedural character that has to exist in the crime-fighting world, which is a procedural world. So there’s a good conflict there and a lot of room for interaction between the other characters."
The Mentalist airs Tuesday nights at 9 on CBS.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of CBS
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